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I write fantasy for tweens and teens. I blog about books and writing and occasionally travel and homeschooling.

My world of Aluvia series is with Curiosity Quills Press, and is an upper-middle grade fantasy, well-suited for ages 11-14, though all ages can enjoy it. FAIRY KEEPER, MER-CHARMER and DRAGON REDEEMER each stand-alone but are best read as a series. My fourth book will be releasing with Blaze Publishing this summer, called THE WORST VILLAIN EVER.

This is a family-friendly site. Note: There are some spoilers in a few of my book reviews, primarily the ones done for my grad school classes. I do warn readers with a big, "SPOILER!" announcement on the review.

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Wednesday, August 6, 2014

Life in a New Place

Moving to Germany includes some really big changes,
obviously. There’s the whole different
language issue. There’s the super tiny
roads business. Hard to miss those
things. But there are a lot of very
small changes that you don’t really think about until you are facing them and
you think, “Huh. That’s really
different.”

Things like:

The toilets: Here,
they stick out of the wall. A German
instructor assured us all they could hold any weight person, thanks to strong
German construction. They have two
buttons, to conserve water. A little
button for little bathroom trips. A big
button for the other. But sometimes one
button is inside the other button and I’m still not sure which to press first.

Bathroom

The evening light: It
stays light until almost 10pm here right now.
Conversely, it’ll get dark by like 4 in the winter. We are much further north than we were, so
the sun has more extreme patterns. I
didn’t see that coming. Fortunately,
there are such things as:

Rolladens. These are
metal outer coverings on the windows that can totally blacken a room. Nice.

Windows: These rarely
if ever have screens. This kills
me. But the windows open two ways that’s
coolT: tilt, which opens the top inward
and open, which swings them wide open into the house. You have to let German houses breathe,
because they don’t have air conditioning.

No AC. That’s right.
No AC. It can get up to 90 in the
summer, but only a few weeks, so they don’t bother updating all their old
buildings with AC. There are only a few
places that have it. But honestly, compared
to the heat of San Antonio, I rarely have felt hot here.

Everything closes early.
If it’s past 6pm, too bad for you unless you live close to post. There are some stores there that are open
later and one 24 hour shopette, I hear.
But the German businesses, except the restaurants, close around 6. The one little stoplight in this village
turns off slightly after that, too, because there’s just so little
traffic.

Cell phone coverage—it’s awful. They blame the thick German buildings, but I
don’t care. I just know I’m paying a lot
for a premium cell plan and half the time, my calls don’t go through and I miss
calls from my husband all the time. We
mostly use FB Messenger, even though there are all those posts about how evil
it is. It uses wifi, which works far
better than the cell phone coverage.

Trash: There are four
different trash cans in our kitchen>
FOUR. One for compost, one for
paper/cardboard, one for plastics and metals and one for everything else. If you fill up your “everything else”
trashcan, you have to buy extra red bags of shame to put out by your trash or
they won’t pick it up if it’s overflowing your garbage can. And they only pick it up every other
week. One week, they’ll pick up one or
two types, and then alternate. So we
have had an old chicken carcass in our fridge for a week and a half, waiting
for when they will pick up the “everything else” trash, because meat can’t go
in compost and it would stink and draw animals if we set it out already.

German washer/dryers.
I hear a lot about how efficient they are. The washers heat their own water, so they don’t
attach to a hot water pipe. But because
of that, one load of wash takes 2 and a half hours. And they hold 1/3 less of what an American
washer does. And then they tell me how efficient they are. And I can only think, “How is spending four
times the time and twice the loads efficient?”
I mean, sure, one load of German wash might take less energy. But I have to do twice as many loads to fit
in all my stuff and do laundry twice as often because you can’t fit as much
stuff in them and they take twice as long to run…how is that more
efficient? We were told yesterday that
within a few years, even the base here will stop offering American style
washer/dryers to us.

German refrigerators—These are tiny. Like, super tiny, because many Germans
apparently shop every day. (Again…this
does not feel efficient to me.) We are
trying to find a home so we can get an American sized fridge to put in our
kitchen, too.

But the spaces here are
tiny and with good reason.

Germany is the size, essentially, of Montana.
Montana holds slightly less than 1 million people. GERMANY holds…want to guess? Make a guess.
I’ll wait.

On Rhine River cruise

Okay, ready? Germany
holds about 81 MILLION people. In the
space of Montana. So they have to have
small houses, small roads, small parking lots, etc, to fit everyone and keep so
much of their beautiful green land. And
it is green and beautiful here, for sure.